> It's got a major company with deep and signficant expertise in security, payments, and accouting. A name that people and companies already trust with a raft of compliance all handled already.
Yes, and they are absolutely _robbing_ the opportunity from others to build in this space, when there are already some really capable players who would have gotten somewhere great. This is a total asshole, closed source company approach. The "loss leader" thing feels totally malicious, and designed to starve the open competition. This is classic Microsoft and rolls back all the positive feelings that had been growing about their growing in the right direction. Amazon does the same shit, to starve competition: "Yeah, you've a spot on our system, but we're going to steal every feature and embed our deeper and drive you out."
For a real example of how OPEN companies work together: Balanced Payments was a daring effort to run an open source payment processor. When they wanted a way to fund and support Gratipay, they went in and submitted a pull request to incorporate their own open source payment processor into the Gratipay platform. If GitHub were in the true spirit of open source, it would have engaged OpenCollective in such a capacity.
I am really disappointed about the hooray optimism and lack of criticism in this thread. I feel like we're all failing to engage in critical engagement with this idea and premise.
What kind of critical engagement do you think we are failing to offer? What kind of response would leave you thinking "This person engaged critically with the issue at hand, but still came away with a strongly positive position"?
For my own part, I don't think anybody is owed a position in a space. I also don't think the existence of small players that get displaced by a big player means that the small players were destined to become big players. It's worth considering that LiberaPay and OpenCollective would never have gotten somewhere great. Perhaps they would always have been doomed to be small and essentially irrelevant. We'll never know, obviously, but it's worth considering.
But let's talk about OpenCollective and how Github could have worked with them. Do you think OpenCollective would have passed a security audit? Are they SOC compliant? Could they have handle the scale?
An even more interesting question: has Github ever claimed to be an OPEN company? I'm certainly not aware of such, though of course my knowledge is less than comprehensive. Charging them with failing to be something that they've never claimed to be seems odd.
Yes. Your charge is correct in an important detail. Github isn't an open source company. As far as I can tell they never have been. It's perhaps somewhat less than maximally reasonable to expect them to become one.
For my own part, this enhances my positive feelings about Microsoft running Github. They're making changes to popularize the idea that it's OK to pay developers to do open source, and doing so in a way that lets developers get paid in a manner of their choice.
It could still be an open platform, of course. Someone just needs to be able to do it better than Github. As Dependabot shows, that's absolutely possible.
> I also don't think the existence of small players that get displaced by a big player means that the small players were destined to become big players. It's worth considering that LiberaPay and OpenCollective would never have gotten somewhere great. Perhaps they would always have been doomed to be small and essentially irrelevant.
I think the difference between small and big players depends also on what their goals are. If the goals of (first Gratipay and then) Liberapay are to fund cool people and cool work, it doesn't matter how much of the funding space they take up as long as they're paying the bills and surviving. If the goal of GitHub is to make $$$ on fees, then yeah, they're going to feel like every other platform is a threat to that goal.
IMHO, there is much more space for different multiple funding platforms than people realize.
> It could still be an open platform, of course. Someone just needs to be able to do it better than Github. As Dependabot shows, that's absolutely possible.
That's actually exactly my point. Dependabot did Github security alerts so much better than Github did, that Github gave up on trying to compete entirely.
Which is to say that it's incontrovertibly possible to beat Github at their own game and on their own platform. To the point where even Github agrees they've been beat.
Your comment reads that you're angry at Github for not taking a more open source approach. That's a fine opinion to have, but it doesn't make sense to demonize them for being a for-profit company. They are not robbing anyone of anything.
Starving the competition with loss-leader tactics is not an unbeatable strategy. If, however, you don't have anything to offer other than a run of the mill payment processing platform, then yea, you're going to have a tough time beating someone who can cut costs. They have a feature you don't, you should lose.
Yes, and they are absolutely _robbing_ the opportunity from others to build in this space, when there are already some really capable players who would have gotten somewhere great. This is a total asshole, closed source company approach. The "loss leader" thing feels totally malicious, and designed to starve the open competition. This is classic Microsoft and rolls back all the positive feelings that had been growing about their growing in the right direction. Amazon does the same shit, to starve competition: "Yeah, you've a spot on our system, but we're going to steal every feature and embed our deeper and drive you out."
For a real example of how OPEN companies work together: Balanced Payments was a daring effort to run an open source payment processor. When they wanted a way to fund and support Gratipay, they went in and submitted a pull request to incorporate their own open source payment processor into the Gratipay platform. If GitHub were in the true spirit of open source, it would have engaged OpenCollective in such a capacity.
I am really disappointed about the hooray optimism and lack of criticism in this thread. I feel like we're all failing to engage in critical engagement with this idea and premise.